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The Art of Life Series 



The Sixth Sense 



THE ART OF LIFE SERIES 
Edward Howard Griggs, Editor 

The Sixth Sense 

ITS CULTIVATION AND USE 



BY 
CHARLES H. BRENT 

AUTHOR OF " WITH GOD IN THE WORLD," 
"LEADERSHIP," " WITH GOD IN PRAYER," ETC. 



NEW YORK 

B. W- HUEBSCH 

191 1 



*4 



Copyright, 1911 
By B. W. HUEBSCH 



PRINTED IN U. S. A. 



ft I) 

©CI.A303668 



TO 

R. C. AND E. M. D., 

DEAR FRIENDS 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

This book was planned and promised to 
the publisher more than three years ago. 
Exacting duties have compelled the writer 
from time to time to defer the completion 
of his undertaking. The delay has been 
profitable in that it has afforded opportunity 
for the study of recent works on kindred 
topics, which in some respects has modified 
and in some enlarged the original concep- 
tion of the subject in hand. A long ocean 
voyage at last has provided the quiet in 
which to write out these thoughts* 

SS. Prinz Eitel Friedrick, 
Gulf of Aden, 
8 January, 191 l a 



CHAPTER 

Introductory Note .... 


PAGE 

• 9 


I 


The Sixth Sense . . 


• 13 


II 


In Relation to Health . . 


• 35 


III 


In Relation to Thought . 


. 52 


IV 


In Relation to Character 


. 69 


V 


In Relation to Religion . . 


. 86 



The Sixth Sense 

CHAPTER I 

THE SIXTH SENSE 

By the Sixth Sense I mean the Mystic 
Sense, or that inner perceptive faculty 
which distinguishes man from the highest 
below him and allies him to the highest 
above him. So distinctive among created 
objects is it of man that it might, not in- 
aptly, be characterized as the Human 
Sense. It is used for no one exclusive 
purpose; on the contrary it is only under 
its operation that man's activities, one and 
all, become human. In its nature it dif- 
fers essentially from the bodily senses 
though we are justified in thinking of :t as 
a sense because its function is, like them, to 
perceive and to afford food for thought. 

The five bodily senses originally, in the 
first stages of evolution, were, and, in their 
ultimate aspect are, one sense — the 

13 



(14 The Sixth Sense 

sense of touch. By means of it plant, 
mollusc and worm relate themselves to 
the universe of which they are a part. 
By degrees the single sense, in the evolu- 
tionary process, finds: opportunity and oc- 
casion for specialization. Sight is ex- 
traordinarily sensitized touch by means of 
which form and color* are perceived, and 
the distant object comes bowing to our 
feet; the stars, leaping across space, are 
converted into intimate friends, and 
earth's farthest horizon lies at our door. 
Hearing is touch localized and special- 
ized so as to be capable of perceiving the 
vibrations caused by the impact of one 
body upon another; its enlarged capacity 
classifies sound in such a way as to offer 
its mutations and subtleties for our use 
and pleasure as the weaver offers his 
threads to the loom. Smell is that spe- 
cialization of touch, uniquely delicate, sup- 
posed by Maeterlinck to be still in its ear- 
lier stage of development in human kind, 
which responds to the stimulus of those 
otherwise intangible exhalations called 
odor. Lastly, taste is touch specialized so 
as to discern the inner properties of food 
stuff; taste is the testing sense. Mere 
touch determines the existence, specialized 



The Sixth Sense 15 

touch the character and niceties of matter 
or the physical universe. 

As indicative of the unity of the animal 
senses and the cooperative sympathy be- 
tween them, it is noteworthy that when one 
sense is impaired or destroyed, the others 
diligently endeavor to supply its absence, 
the entire body playing the part as far as 
possible of eye or ear or both, and each 
remaining sense growing extraordinarily 
acute so as to take on somewhat of the 
character of the most nearly affiliated or 
the neighbor sense. The blind man can 
almost see with ears and hands, the deaf 
can almost hear with eyes. The senses 
that are left strain, not without a measure 
of success, to convey to the brain impres- 
sions for which they are not congenitally 
adapted. 

The organic differences in the bodily 
senses, then, find a close unity in functional 
similarity, all the sensory nerves grouping 
themselves under the head of touch. The 
Mystic Sense, likewise, first comes to our 
attention as a simple faculty of percep- 
tion by which we gain cognition of that 
department of reality that transcends bod- 
ily touch and its subdivisions, but study 
reveals that its unity is ordered complexity, 



16 The Sixth Sense 

as in the case of all developed endow- 
ments. Broadly speaking it is the sense 
which relates man to the spiritual or psy- 
chic aspect of reality. It puts us into re- 
lation with the spiritual order of which 
we are a part. It finds room for exer- 
cise, gains its freedom, and reaches its 
highest development in this sphere, be- 
ginning operations at the point where the 
bodily senses are compelled by inherent 
limitations to halt. It discerns the inner- 
most character, use, value of the objective, 
and differentiates between the human and 
the animal estimate of things. Indeed it 
has in it that which is not of this world or 
order. It soars beyond human and mun- 
dane affairs and steeps its wings in Divine 
altitudes where the throne of God is set. 
Not only does it perceive but it also lays 
hold of and appropriates that phase of re- 
ality which lies beyond the unaided reach, 
or eludes the grasp, of all the rest of our 
faculties in their happiest combination, and 
therefore of any one of them independently. 
It takes the material gathered by physical 
contact with the world of sight and sound, 
and presents it to the mind for rationaliz- 
ing operations. More than that, it comes 
back freighted with wealth gathered in 



The Sixth Sense 17 

explorations in regions where neither body 
nor reason can tread, converting life's dull 
prose into poetry and song. 

The most alert and indispensable of en- 
dowments, it is at once sociable with the 
remainder of man's faculties, external and 
internal, and jealously independent of 
them saving of human consciousness alone. 
In its higher stages of development it ac- 
cepts suggestions from all, dictation from 
none. Its manner is courteous and its 
mode of approach one of promptings and 
hints. The sphere of every other faculty 
is its sphere where it is content to play the 
modest part of a handmaiden, never usurp- 
ing functions already provided for, al- 
though it has a sphere of its own whither 
not even reason can follow. It is supple- 
mentary to all, contradictory to none. 
Without its exercise there can be no prog- 
ress or growth. It has its origin in a 
groping instinct, its final development in 
orderly activities capable of increasingly 
clear classification. Body, intellect, char- 
acter, moral and religious, are under its 
influence and dependent upon its beneficent 
operations. It plays upon the body, con- 
tributing to its health and efficiency; it gives 
;wings to the intellect, making it creative 



1 8. The Sixth Sense 

and productive, capable of formulating 
hypotheses and venturing upon speculation ; 
it converts the seemingly impossible into 
the normal, bringing moral ideals within 
reach of the will, without which improve- 
ment in character would be a matter of 
chance; it unfolds the Divine to the hu- 
man and forms a nexus between here and 
beyond, now and to-morrow, finite and in- 
finite, God and man. It looks not only 
up but down, making the nature outside 
of us intelligible to the nature inside of us 
and friendly with it. If it peoples the 
stars, it also makes a universe of the atom. 
It is mysterious, recollective, emotional, in- 
tuitive, speculative, imaginative, prophetic, 
minatory, expectant, penetrative. As it 
moves up or down with equal freedom, so 
it reaches backward or forward, is at- 
tached or detached at will, in its opera- 
tions. 

The Sixth Sense, or, to be more accurate, 
the second group of senses, has its special- 
ized functions, difficult as it is to analyze 
with accuracy this most spiritual endow- 
ment of human personality, the inner gift 
of touch. It has specializations parallel 
to those of the bodily senses. Sight, hear- 
ing and testing are its functions. So clear 



The Sixth Sense 19 

eyed is it that it can see with the nicety of 
an eye aided by the microscope, so sensitive 
to voices that the lowest whispers impart 
a message, so critical as to test values with 
a precision and swiftness that surpass the 
taste and smell which tell us what is sweet 
and what unsavory. 

If it be argued that I am but dilating 
on certain aspects of mind, I am not con- 
cerned to deny that all may be compre- 
hended under that convenient blanket-word. 
But they are as distinct from the rational- 
izing media as from the will. 

The nearest approach to a satisfactory 
substitute for the term " mystic sense " in 
terms of the reason is " conceptual rea- 
son." It furnishes us with the thought of 
a faculty which has procreative or genera- 
tive properties capable of being fertilized 
by intercourse with that which is separate 
from and higher than itself. Its first ac- 
tivity is to lay itself over against that 
which, though partaking of its own na- 
ture, is not itself. It is not self-fertilizing 
and can conceive or beget only after hav- 
ing perceived and apprehended. 1 It has 

1 It is only partially true to say that concept follows 
upon percept. Their action is simultaneous more 
nearly than consecutive. Conceptualism as a com- 
plete system cannot perhaps stand but in its origin it 



20 The Sixth Sense 

constant regard for an objective and com- 
munication with it. 

The operation of the Mystic Sense is 
summed up in the single word faith, 
which is described as the giving substafltST 
to that which is hoped for, the testing of 
things not seen. 1 There is no objection to 
letting the word faith cover the whole 
working of the Mystic Sense, provided it 
is not restricted to a severely religious 
meaning. It is thus that it is commonly 
understood, or at any rate when applied in 
other connections it is assumed to be the 
working of a different faculty from that 
exercised in the sphere of religion. In its 
distinctively religious meaning, faith is the 
operation of the Mystic Sense in its highest 
employment. There is no one faculty that 
is reserved exclusively for religious em- 
ployment. The fact is that religious faith 
is no more separate from the processes of 
the Mystic Sense which appropriate health 
for the body, hypotheses for the mind, 
working principles for the man of action, 
and ideals for the character, or independent 
of them, than the act of physical percep- 

was a healthy reaction against both nominalism and 
realism, as well as a mediator combining the good in 
both. 
iHeb. xi:x. 



The Sixth Sense 21 

tion, which enables us to touch the stars, is 
separate from that use of the sensory 
nerves which relates us to the book we 
handle, or independent of it. They are 
both the result of a single faculty, or group 
of faculties, operating in different altitudes. 
Faith will be accepted in these pages as a 
philosophic term. Thus we speak of 
scientific faith, moral faith, and religious 
faith with equal appropriateness, meaning 
the Mystic Sense operating respectively in 
the interests of the scientific, of the moral, 
and of the religious. 

The Mystic Sense has for its workshop 
the uplands of life in the rarefied atmos- 
phere of ideas and ideals. It is at once a 
super-sense giving us a bird's-eye view of 
the universe which is not permitted at close 
quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before 
our attention the contents hidden beneath 
the surface of things. There are not two 
worlds, objective and subjective respec- 
tively, but two aspects of one world — 
things as they are in their absolute and ul- 
timate being, and things as they are rela- 
tively or as apprehended by our cognitive 
powers. Our conception of the truth is a 
distortion or falls short of the truth, and it 
is our aspiration to bring about such a co- 



22 The Sixth Sense 

incidence as will make the relation of sub- 
ject to object perfect. We draw the thing 
as we see it for the God of things as they 
are now, not to-morrow only, the sole dif- 
ference being that to-morrow our painting 
will be truer to the original and conse- 
quently more artistic than now. All ob- 
jective is immediately reduced by man, by 
subconscious or conscious process, into sub- 
jective, so that we may for the sake of con- 
venience talk of subjective and objective 
phases of reality, the subjective being hu- 
man, partial, progressive, the objective be- 
ing divine, absolute, and final. 

There is an objective physical world and 
an objective psychic or spiritual world, 
the latter being immanent in the former, 
though not limited by it, so that every ma- 
terial object has spiritual contents. The 
spiritual is no more an inside without an 
outside than the physical is an outside with- 
out an inside. Each has its phase of re- 
ality, though in the ultimate analysis the 
physical is dependent for its value upon its 
spiritual capacity. The physical has a 
non-sensible inside which to be discerned 
calls for distinctively human as distin- 
guished from mere animal powers of per- 
ception. Dimly in animal life there is a 



The Sixth Sense 23 

recognition of inner character in objects — 
hostility, affinity, nourishment and the like 
are instinctively sensed ; but here deep per- 
ception stops except where, by reason of 
what is called domestication or association 
with man, certain human characteristics are 
faintly imaged in dog or horse. 

There is no antagonism between the 
physical and the spiritual. The physical 
world is to man a medium through which 
phases of the spiritual are reached. The 
only antagonism there can be is that which 
arises by an attempt to use the material 
without regard for its full spiritual contents 
or inside. Were not the physical universe 
a sacrament it would be a phantasm. If 
man divorces the inside from the outside 
with a view to gratifying his physical 
senses he abdicates his character as a man 
to become ah animal; if to feed anything 
less than his entire selfhood, he presents 
the spectacle of arrested development. 
The bodily senses alone can get at the full 
content, the deep inside of nothing, no mat- 
ter how pronounced its objectivity, " The 
truly real is a thing that has an inside." * 
The more pronounced or attractive the ex- 

1 Von HUgel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 
vol. ii, p. 264. 



24 The Sixth Sense 

ternal substance and form of a material 
object and the closer we are to it, the 
greater the difficulty for the average char- 
acter to gain cognition of its spiritual es- 
sence. " How hardly shall they that have 
riches enter into the Kingdom of God," 1 
Even those who place an undue valuation 
upon the material, whether possessed of 
wealth or not, have a like difficulty in pene- 
trating into the internal realm which lies, 
beneath and around as well as above and 
within the external. 2 It is absurd for men 
to expect to sense the spiritual except with 
spiritual faculties. The physical world is 
perceived by a sensory apparatus of the 
same substance as that of the physical 
world; the spiritual world is perceived by 
a sensory apparatus of the same substance 
as that of the spiritual world. There must 
be an inherent affinity between the thing 
apprehended and the organ apprehending. 
Now the natural man receiveth not the 
things of the Spirit of God; for they are 
foolishness unto him ; and he cannot know 
them because they are spiritually proved. 3 

x Mk. x:23. 

2 Mk. x:24, 25. 

3^-uxtKos dk avOpidiros ov dix €TCLl r * T °v TLvedparos 
rov Geou : fiupia yap avTta i<rri f icai ov divarai yvtavai, 
6ti irvevfiariKws dvaKplvcrai. 1 Cor. ii, 14. 



The Sixth Sense 2$ 

Reality is a term too often confined to 
that which can be expressed in terms of 
bodily senses; whereas it is that which has 
existence in heaven above, in the earth be- 
neath, and in the waters under the earth, 
and which, apart from human perception, 
though in a minimum degree or passively, 
plays upon and affects man and his uni- 
verse, but which reaches its highest poten- 
tiality manward when, by the volitional 
operation of human faculties it is subjec- 
tively apprehended and finds permanent 
place in his consciousness. Reality is that 
which supports and feeds the subconscious 
life by the pressure of its mere existence 
or laws of being, but which is capable of 
bestowing larger gifts in proportion to the 
degree in which it receives conscious ad- 
mission into the activities of personal ex- 
perience. It is a law of spiritual or 
psychic, as well as of physical, existence 
that every part is related to every other 
part and influenced by it through either at- 
traction or energy. In the case of inani- 
mate matter mere spacial propinquity or 
distance determines the measure of attrac- 
tion or energy of object upon object, but 
where sentient beings are concerned the 
reaction of conscious volition on environ- 



26 The Sixth Sense 

ment is the determining factor regulating 
the degree of influence released. 

The search for the real in internal proc- 
esses cannot ignore the external. Con- 
versely the activities of the workaday 
world cannot summarily dismiss the in- 
ternal. 1 The physical senses have a mod- 
est but indispensable part to play under the 
primacy of the Mystic Sense. The normal 
use of the Mystic Sense does not make a 
mystic. The healthily developed man is 
mystical though not a mystic. His dom- 
inating sense is that of the spirit, not that 
of the flesh. A mystic, technically defined, 
is a specialist in the subjective or internal, 
just as a collector is a specialist in the ob- 
jective or external. There is no danger 
in either extreme except so far as its votary 
adopts an exclusive attitude toward its 
seeming opposite (which really is its com- 
plement), or toward the balance of human 
thought and life. A deliberate and per- 
sistent use of the Mystic Sense without re- 
spect for the objective would be subversive 

1 " True priority and superiority lies, not with one 
of these constituents against the other, but with the 
total subjective — objective interaction or resultant, 
which is superior, and indeed gives their place and 
worth to, those interdependent parts." — Von HUgel's 
Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, p. 114. 



The Sixth Sense 27 

of all progress and a reversion to chaos. 
14 The progress of thought consists in grad- 
ually separating the series of objective and 
universally valid, from that of subjective 
experiences. In the measure that their 
confusion prevails, man is, to all intents 
and purposes, mad; and it is this note of 
insanity that characterizes medicine and re- 
ligion in their early stages. Dreams and 
reality are mixed up; subjective connections 
are objectified." * If the objective and the 
subjective may not be divorced and set at 
odds against one another, neither may they 
be confused. Both errors would result in 
disorder and hopeless perplexity. 

The serious crux is how, in the realm 
of the spiritual and the physically intangi- 
ble, to distinguish between the real and 
the seeming, the true and the false. This 
it is the function of the Mystic Sense to do 
aided by the full complement of inner fac- 
ulties. In a measure the Mystic Sense, like 
the bodily senses, acts automatically, but 
like them it needs special training in order 
to separate phantasm from reality, to de- 
termine values, and to grade and classify 
ideals until they reveal themselves to be 
ordered unity, not less but more mysterious 

1 Tyrrell's Christianity at the Cross Roads, p. 240. 



28 The Sixth Sense 

because more intelligible or apprehensible 
by the whole man. The first principle to 
lay down is that no man can treat himself 
as a unit or credit the findings of his Mys- 
tic Sense with absolute or final authority 
until he has tried them by some valid cor- 
porate test. Neither sight, nor hearing, 
nor touch, used without regard to the ex- 
perience of others and respect for it, can 
fail to lead us astray. The conclusions of 
the wisest and the competent register them- 
selves from age to age, coming to us in 
the shape of beneficent authority to pre- 
vent a man from repeating work that has 
already been done and well done. Veri- 
fication is not contemptuous of authority, 
though he flouts authority, indeed, who 
ignores it in a process of individualistic ex- 
periments. Pure individualism at best can 
apprehend but a fragment of reality and at 
worst declines into eccentricity or even in- 
sanity. Those who are really educated 
recognize their relation to a social whole 
and bring the results of their sense percep- 
tions, before accepting their verdict, to be 
tested by the age-long, man-wide experi- 
ences of humanity as formulated in the ac- 
cepted conclusions of their generation and 
found in its institutions and customs. Uni- 



The Sixth Sense 29 

versal experience is never wholly but only 
approximately infallible, yet accurate 
enough to be authoritative for corrective 
purposes. By respectful attention to it, in- 
dividual judgment is checked in possible 
error and at the same time is given oppor- 
tunity to offer its own contribution to the 
totality of knowledge, a contribution which 
may endorse, modify, or enlarge that al- 
ready reached. In this way only is so- 
ciety preserved from becoming a mob of 
eccentrics and fanatics, each whirling in his 
own little circle. Commerce, art, science, 
letters, government, religion — in short 
every department of life you can think of 
requires such a mode of procedure for the 
protection of reality in its varied manifes- 
tations and for the protection of the indi- 
vidual against himself. But in no condi- 
tions is a social checking off of findings 
more essential than in the psychic or spir- 
itual realm. Mystical experience organ- 
izes itself or is consciously organized in a 
sufficient degree to give men that high kind 
of freedom which comes to us when we act 
with constant reference to the fact that we 
are members one of another, so that the 
experience of the human race is ours where- 
with to enrich ourselves. A mystic of the 



30 The Sixth Sense 

type of St. Theresa, who could hardly see 
the objective in her rush past form to reach 
idea, could not be distinguished from the 
inmate of a madhouse who insists that his 
tinsel crown is the diadem of a Napoleon, 
unless she interpreted her personal experi- 
ence in relation to the spiritual conscious- 
ness of Christendom. " Once," writes 
this saint, " when I was holding in my hand 
the cross of my rosary, He took it from 
me into His own hand. He returned it; 
but it was then four large stones incompar- 
ably more precious than diamonds: the 
five wounds were delineated on them with 
the most admirable art. He said to me 
that for the future that cross would appear 
so to me always, and so it did. The pre- 
cious stones were seen, however, only by 
myself." * A madman would have omit- 
ted the last sentence. Her mystical ex- 
perience was individual though it preserved 
for its foundation a background of uni- 
versal experience. It united her to her fel- 
lows, instead of separating her from them. 
The law of use is as applicable to the 
Mystic Sense as to the rest of the gifts and 
endowments which make up the complete- 
ness of human personality. Its exercise 

1 Quoted by Von HtfcEL, vol. ii, p. 18. 



The Sixth Sense 31 

enlarges its capacity and quickens its gen- 
eral efficiency; if used through the whole 
range of its opportunities, it becomes a 
hardy faculty, trustworthy in every sphere 
where its responsibility lies; specialization 
of operation in one direction, to the par- 
tial neglect of other departments open to 
it, produces acuteness in one direction and 
dulness in other directions which is char- 
acteristic of specialists in science; if the 
specialization is so exclusive as to shut off 
observation and consideration of every in- 
terest but one, there must ensue lop-sided 
growth and maimed personality. 

It is the purpose of this book to trace 
the operation of the Mystic Sense in normal 
manhood through the major departments 
of human experience in order to encourage 
greater confidence in this wonderful gift, 
to appeal for a more comprehensive use of 
it, and to indicate how it may be culti- 
vated. 

NOTE TO CHAPTER I. 

Von Hugel in his study of the Mystical Element 
of Religion concludes that there is " no distinct fac- 
ulty of mystical apprehension." In a passage follow- 
ing this contention (vol. ii, pp. 283, 284), he so states 
his position as to make it possible for me to start 
from a contradictory assertion and reach his con- 



32 The Sixth Sense 

elusion. We agree that mysticism is "not everything 
in any one soul, but something in every soul of man." 
The entire passage reads as follows: 

"Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a 
specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical 
mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly 
not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic 
proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism 
does constitute such an entirely separate, completely 
self-supported kind of human experience. This de- 
nial does not, of course, mean that soul does not 
differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and 
kind of the recoil ective, intuitive, deeply emotive ele- 
ment possessed and exercised by it concurrently or 
alternately with other elements, — the sense of the 
Infinite within and without the Finite springing up 
in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contin- 
gent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital 
differences and vocations amongst souls cannot be 
and are not still further developed by grace and 
heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, 
so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem 
hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But 
it means that, in even the most purely contingent- 
seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional 
and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there 
can never fail to be, some, however, implicit, however 
slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of 
the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction 
with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion 
for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, 
our true home. And,' again, it means, that even the 
most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, 



The Sixth Sense 33 

for the fulness and healthiness of even the most 
purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon 
its past and present contacts with the Contingent, 
Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and 
elements, as upon its movement of concentration, 
and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of 
those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite 
within and around those finitudes and itself. 

" Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full 
dignity, which consists precisely in being, not every- 
thing in any one soul, but something in every soul 
of man; and in presenting at its fullest, the amplest 
development, among certain special natures with the 
help of certain special graces and heroisms, or what, 
in some degree and form, is present in every truly 
human soul, and in such a soul's every, at all genuine 
and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. 
And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain 
all the strength and escape the weaknesses and 
dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the 
mode and character or Religious Experience, Knowl- 
edge, and Life." 

If my interpretation of this writer be correct, he 
terms that a " recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive 
element " which I conceive to be a mystic faculty or 
sense. The fact that it pervades every part of human 
personality does not disqualify it from claiming the 
dignity of a distinctive faculty. It bears a similar 
relation to the higher endowments of personality 
which the ether bears to light and to the call of 
world to world. The Mystic Sense is the enabling 
faculty, which makes man human. Its pervasiveness 
does not detract from, rather does it enhance, its dis- 



34 The Sixth Sense 

tinctness. To call it an element seems to clothe it 
in a vagueness which its character does not merit. 
If man were merely a phase of matter, we could 
employ the term element with propriety. That which 
can be only an element in a universe, at any rate may 
be a faculty or sense in man. 



CHAPTER II 

IN RELATION TO HEALTH 

There is nothing so multiple in its com- 
position, and yet nothing so seemingly sim- 
ple, so unit-like a unity, as normal person- 
ality — a normal character englobed by a 
normal body. Normality is the product 
of a two-fold force, the true interrelation 
between the organs of the body and a sim- 
ilar interrelation between the inner facul- 
ties, culminating in a rhythmic interaction 
between the two. The normal man acts 
in the completeness of his manhood in all 
that he does, never adopting the role of 
either mere machine or mere ghost. In 
so far as the inside and the outside of man 
work as a unity, the dignity of human per- 
sonality manifests itself; any departure 
from harmony approaches that dangerous 
borderland beyond which lies disintegra- 
tion and disorder. Disease is a lack of 
rhythm, a note in the scale out of tune. 
Health is harmony. 

Up to the time that consciousness of ex- 

35 



36 The Sixth Sense 

istence awakens, the processes of life op- 
erate under the stimulus and protection of 
the human and physical environment which 
surround the infant. With the immediate 
effect of suitable shelter and wholesome 
nourishment we are fairly conversant. As 
to just what direct or indirect influence 
psychic surroundings have upon the subcon- 
scious life of a baby, we are not in a posi- 
tion to dogmatize, though we can arrive 
inferentially at certain rational probabili- 
ties. 

Apparently the infant, and certainly the 
child, is extraordinarily sensitive to subtle 
forces. Acting upon this supposition the 
Christian Church from the beginning, by 
a symbolic and sacramental act, has aimed 
to thrust children deep into the bosom of 
God by the rite of baptism, and claimed 
for them not only a place but a place of 
chief importance in the spiritual society. 
Instinctively the mother, with exquisite so- 
licitude, whispers her ideals for the future 
of her offspring into the ears of the babe 
at her breast, talking as though to one 
whose consciousness were awake. In this 
way Samuels have been raised to Israel. 
At the close of each day the mother bids 
her child sleep by singing lullabies and 



The Sixth Sense 37 

hanging mystic poppies over wide-awake 
eyes. She speaks in the highest type of 
language, in poetry adorned with song, to 
this little unconscious scrap of humanity. 
In other words her mystic sense is press- 
ing upon the mystic sense of her child as 
naturally and fittingly as her arms fold 
the infant body and her lips touch its cheek. 
Unless positive proof to the contrary is 
adduced, it is safe to believe that it makes 
a great difference to the child's after life 
of what sort its psychic environment is dur- 
ing its first years on earth, whether the 
minds about it are healthy, expressing 
themselves healthily, whether the tone of 
family life is hopeful and spiritual. 
Though it cannot finally determine the 
course that the child's life will take, at any 
rate it affords the best opportunity for 
making it a worthy course. My convic- 
tion is, that the difference between good 
and bad psychic environment for a baby 
is the same as that between healthy and 
unhealthy vegetable environment for a 
young plant. An infant abandoned by its 
mother to the care of nurses and servants, 
be the provision for its animal comfort and 
safety what it may, begins life with a min- 
imum of opportunity. Man is not born 



38 The Sixth Sense 

mere animal but man from the first breath. 
Therefore from the first breath he needs 
man's surroundings. In order that his 
latent character may have its best chance, 
he ought to be given the most congenial 
human environment available. If there is 
no conscious self, at any rate there is a 
subconscious self, struggling at a very early 
moment by baby smiles and frets, gropings 
and babblings to utter itself. Psychology 
seems to have reached at least this conclu- 
sion — that the subconscious is, that it is 
the fundamental part of man, that it is his 
most sensitive self, never relinquishing 
that which it grasps and grasping every- 
thing that touches it. 

Psychic forces may influence mightily 
the subconscious life of an infant and pro- 
mote healthy character, but have they any 
effect on physical well-being? The reply 
would seem to be that, if at any time in 
the span of a lifetime they work benefi- 
cently in this direction, it is probable that 
they do so from the outset. It would be 
sheer waste of time to adduce arguments 
to prove that healthy minds conduce di- 
rectly to healthy physique. The difficulty 
is to find the limit of such influence, so vast 
is it. Physical well-being, however, is not 



The Sixth Sense 39 

an end in itself, and it is a subversion of 
the human order to aim at health of mind 
or character in order that our physique 
may be improved. So nicely is human na- 
ture proportioned and adjusted that it is 
doubtful whether a person could achieve 
physical health by becoming good with that 
sole end in view. Physical health is not 
essential to a high degree of human effi- 
ciency, though health of character is and 
therefore must be sought first because of 
its priceless value. But it is our just as- 
sumption that a child with a healthy body 
is more likely to have a normal inner per- 
sonality than if it had a sickly body. Outer 
and inner health act and react and interact 
so that it is equally true to say that, given 
a healthy mind and disposition, other 
things being equal, the body will have the 
best opportunity of being normal and, 
whatever its condition, of being used to 
the best advantage. There can be no con- 
sideration of higher importance than to 
make a child sensitive as soon after birth 
as possible, to his psychic, moral, and mys- 
tical environment. It will conduce to lofti- 
ness of character and, for aught we know, 
to useful longevity and vigor of physique. 
Only soulless animals can be satisfied 



40 The Sixth Sense 

with physical splendor or count muscle suf- 
ficient in itself. Man by virtue of his man- 
hood can never live according to merely 
animal laws. His animal nature itself is 
ultimately weakened if he does. In pro- 
portion as he has fine physique he must de- 
velop a fine mind and character. If not, un- 
restrained passion and ruin stare him in the 
face. The body finds its full meaning 
and so its possibilities, only when the soul 
has discovered itself and claimed its lib- 
erty. It is then alone that a whole army 
of anxieties and fears is scattered, leaving 
the body free and joyously adventurous, 
ready to identify its movements with those 
of the soul. Consequently it is not illogi- 
cal or untrue to say that the first requisite 
for physical efficiency of a child is to in- 
sure that whatever its subconscious life is 
able to drink in should be sweet, whole- 
some, and strong. The tone of domestic 
life, the character of the child's attendants, 
the whole expanse of human bosom on 
which it lies and from which it receives 
nourishment, ought to be as near what one 
would wish it to be if from the first the 
little babe had a conscious as well as a sub- 
conscious self, and were a morally responsi- 
ble and not a mere non-moral agent. 



The Sixth Sense 41 

There can be a healthy domestic environ- 
ment for the keen-eyed, deep-seeing child 
only when it has been preceded by a simi- 
lar environment for the baby. What the 
tone was for the purely subconscious, it 
will be for the conscious life when it 
awakes. Therefore even though parents 
are skeptical of their influence upon infant 
subconsciousness, they cannot dispense with 
attention to its character if they hope to 
bring beneficial pressure to bear on the 
child's conscious life. From the first they 
must learn to deal with a baby as a moral 
being, impressionable beyond observation. 
When we turn to man's conscious life 
and the relation between health of body 
and a healthy consciousness we are on more 
demonstrable ground. Experience has 
proved that our external and internal fac- 
ulties work in sympathy with one another. 
If the body is distressed, the inner con- 
sciousness droops; if the inner conscious- 
ness becomes morbid or out of sorts, the 
body, though not always actually falling ill, 
loses in efficiency. Yet, let it be added, 
the body is less able to bear psychic illness 
than the inner self to bear physical illness. 
The body can never turn psychic suffering 
into nerve and muscle, but the psychic na- 



42 The Sixth Sense 

ture can weave malady into genius through 
the powerful operation of the Mystic Sense. 

To be healthy is a commendable ambi- 
tion. Being in good health, our desire is 
to become as immune as may be to disease, 
or being ill to give ourselves the best chance 
of recovery. Health is preserved by keep- 
ing body and mind in close relation to 
health-giving processes. It is not our con- 
cern to discuss in this connection questions 
of diet, sanitation, hygiene, exercise and 
similar aids to the promotion of health. 
Their value is of the first order and may 
not be ignored or discounted. But just 
now we are concerned with another part 
of human nature which has much to do in 
determining our condition of body — the 
sense which furnishes us with ideals. 

The objective of an ideal is found in 
the idea flowing from the mind of God. 
It is as real to the Mystic Sense as a flower 
is to sight and smell. An ideal is the re- 
flection of God's idea and is distorted or 
true according as the sense which perceives 
ideas is healthy or diseased. The Mystic 
Sense relates us to ideas, and enables us to 
touch, test, see and hear them, as truly as our 
bodily senses enable us to touch, test, see 
and hear the world of matter, form and 



The Sixth Sense 43 

sound. A healthy ideal is a vitalizing 
force, an unhealthy ideal is an invitation to 
disease. Ideals are subjectified ideas. 

In the course of the development of that 
most experimental of all sciences, medicine, 
not only has dosing been reduced to a min- 
imum, but also the natural recuperative 
powers of the patient have been discovered 
and are relied upon. The physician tries 
to open, for the sick, doors into nature's 
healthiest rooms. The patient being 
placed in a vitalizing environment is ex- 
pected by the use of his will and Mystic 
Sense to respond to it. The physician 
alone can do but half the work. The will, 
and not only the willingness, to live, a mys- 
tical laying hold of the idea of health, is 
in all cases a valuable, in some an indis- 
pensable, factor in the process of recov- 
ery. The suggestion of health predisposes 
to health; the suggestion of disease is 
provocative of disease. Medicine may be 
both a material curative and a sacrament 
of health. 

The habit of our day has been such as to 
create in us a marked pathological con- 
sciousness. The very process which, by 
slow degrees, has been driving disease to 
the wall, has produced in us a sensitiveness 



44 (The Sixth Sense 

to the idea of disease that is inimical to 
health. The discovery of the causes of 
disease has peopled the imagination, even 
of those who have never looked through 
a microscope, with an army of hostile germs 
to the obscuration of those superior influ- 
ences which conduce to well-being, until we 
have become chronically nervous of the 
hidden perils which beset our path* In- 
significant pains are construed into the 
symptoms of the last disease discussed in 
the papers or the advertisement of a pro- 
prietary nostrum. Momentary fluctua- 
tions in health send us tripping with anx- 
ious brow to the doctor. Dabbling in pa- 
thology is an undesirable occupation, es- 
pecially for the young. The wrappers of 
patent medicines, let alone the medicines 
themselves, have caused more agony than 
peace of mind and have been more provoca- 
tive of disease than of health. Happily 
we are emerging from the patent medicine 
stage. 

A therapeutic consciousness ought to be 
the normal consciousness. The forces 
which make for life are in excess of those 
which make for death. The universe 
would go into steady decline were not the 
dominant forces salutary, and life would 



(The Sixth Sense 45 

flicker out like the wick of a candle gut- 
tered in its socket. There is an inexhausti- 
ble fund of vitality open to man and we 
are competent to draw upon it so that we 
shall receive a maximum rather than a min- 
imum. Part of the function of science is 
to put man into such a relation to the 
nature outside of him as to place the whole- 
some and remedial at his disposal, pre- 
venting disease by immunizing him from it. 
It is the common laws of health which are 
the most important. With the curious in- 
consistency which characterizes many hu- 
man beings, we frequently see men adher- 
ing to some vigorous regimen of secondary 
or doubtful importance, while all the time 
they are flagrantly disobeying some pri- 
mary law of health. The unity between 
the outer and the inner necessitates not only 
an intelligent and scientific treatment but 
also that which is mystical and more or 
less mysterious. Prayer, which is at once 
an appeal to the Source of Life to let loose 
saving health in our direction and an open- 
ing up of our being for the reception of 
hidden and unknown aid, is a higher form 
of psychic effort than either suggestion or 
auto-suggestion in that it includes both, 
though not precluding the concurrent use 



46 The Sixth Sense 

of either. Auto-suggestion looks only for 
self-induced benefit to the patient by ap- 
plication to an impersonal ideal; prayer 
does not think merely to apprehend a pas- 
sive or indifferent remedy, but also to be 
apprehended by healthful, forceful Person- 
ality, like but superior to our own. A 
prayer to the ether would have in its reflex 
effect a totally different influence on the 
petitioner from a prayer to what was con- 
ceived to be a personal God. Similarly 
the quality of the virtue which is the result 
of mere ethical culture is as different from 
that which is the product of correspond- 
ence with the Christian's God as cotton 
is from linen. Nor is it that God is inac- 
tive until we pray. He is operating to the 
uttermost that our listless or passive or 
antagonistic personality will allow. The 
highest personality can do his best to 
the object of his love only when the. latter 
adopts a responsive and co-operative atti- 
tude. The feeble spot in much, if not 
most, prayer, is that it asks without impor- 
tunity, or importunes without appropriat- 
ing. The Mystic Sense must reach up until 
it feels the hand containing the gift, and 
take the gift as its own. Auto-suggestion 
is a lame term indicating the application of 



The Sixth Sense 47 

the ideal to the defective. Suggestion is a 
similar application on the part of another 
to a companion. With a background of 
prayer, the insomnia patient can with profit 
watch the dream sheep go through the 
hedge, or lay himself in the cradle of old 
nursery rhymes, or welcome to his bedside 
the veiled legions of slumber as they troop 
forth on their silent errand from the pres- 
ence of Him who giveth His beloved sleep. 
Faith^ which is simply the highest opera- 
tion oTthe mystic sense, is as necessary to 
the complete work of healing as in the 
days when Jesus said, " According to thy 
faith be it unto thee." It appropriates to 
the full the remedial contents of scientific 
agencies which, under its touch become sac- 
ramental, and clothes the life in the soft 
robe of unanxious peace and serene cheer- 
fulness. It is easy enough for a well man 
to talk to the sick concerning the desira- 
bility and curative value of a therapeutic 
consciousness. The depressed soul resents 
the necessity of being called upon to act 
independently of the body and in opposi- 
tion to it. Most patients, too, for the time 
being are inclined to count each one his 
own case unique. But the Mystic Sense is 
wonderfully elastic. Cheerfulness comes 



48 The Sixth Sense 

by being cheerful, hope by being hopeful, 
calmness by being calm, healthymindedness 
by being healthyminded. This is the work 
of the Mystic Sense living in the realm of 
vigor even when the body is in distress. 
When the Mystic Sense goes exploring in 
high altitudes it never comes back empty 
handed. Even when it fails to return with 
health of body, it holds in its grasp health 
of mind. A blithe spirit in a feeble body 
can accomplish more than a sluggish spirit 
in a robust body. There are two kinds 
of healthymindedness — temperamental 
and acquired. The latter is the most pow- 
erful and may be had by anyone who culti- 
vates his Mystic Sense. 

The extent to which the Mystic Sense 
works toward a cure cannot be formulated. 
It varies with conditions. Of this we can 
be assured. It is always salutary, fre- 
quently indispensable. Diseases caused or 
induced by an abuse or morbid use of the 
imagination cannot be banished without 
the aid of the Mystic Sense as the chief 
agent. The imagination must be cured 
before the sickness can be cured, and there 
are instances when the cure of the imagina- 
tion is the cure of the disease. That is 



The Sixth Sense 49 

none the less a disease, the seat of which 
is in the psychic, rather than in the physical 
part of self. 

Two things remain to be said. First, 
our day is laying a dangerous accent on 
the value of mere physical life in man. It 
tends to foster physical self-consciousness 
and is an aspect of degrading materialism. 
All the efforts being put forth in the direc- 
tion of making it possible for the physic- 
ally feeble to survive, are dangerous, un- 
less followed up by commensurate efforts 
to make them fit as characters. Mere ex- 
istence and mere longevity are false gods. 

It is haply justifiable for men of low 
breed, who honestly think this life the only 
one, to grasp at all its available gifts, and 
struggle to retain it on any terms for as 
long a period as may be. But not so 
among those who have risen to a knowl- 
edge of the meaning of immortality, even 
in its lesser aspects, of the perpetuation of 
the nation and the race, and the persistence 
of a man's work and influence among men 
after he himself has vanished. For such 
there is a higher food than mere life, beside 
which mere survival looks cheap and worth- 
less. 



5<3 The Sixth Sense 

" A man must live, we justify 
Low shift and trick to treason high, 
A little vote for a little gold 
To a whole senate bought and sold, 
By that self-evident reply. 

But is it so? Pray tell me why 
Life at such cost you have to buy? 
In what religion were you told 
A man must live? 

There are times when a man must die, 

Imagine, for a battle-cry, 

From soldiers, with a sword to hold, — 
From soldiers, with the flag unrolled, — 

This coward's whine, this liar's lie, — 
A man must live ! " x 

There is, however, a type of heroism 
which is not as uncommon as it seems to be 
for it is hidden — the type to which Kip- 
ling refers when he says: 

" If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
And so hold on, when there is nothing in you 
Except the will which says to them: * Hold 
on!'"— ■ 

and once more we quote from another 
writer: 

" Let us, for one thing, never forget that 

1 Charlotte Perkins Stetson's In this our World. 



The Sixth Sense 51 

physical health is not the true end of hu- 
man life, but only one of its most important 
means and conditions. . . • Death may 
and should be risked, the slow but certain 
undermining of the physical health may be 
laudably embarked on, if only the mind 
and character are not damaged, and if the 
end to be attained is found to be necessary 
or seriously helpful, and unattainable by 
other means." * 

Secondly, special and mystical means of 
promoting or regaining health must have 
as a background the accumulated knowl- 
edge and scientific skill of the day. If 
there are individual exceptions here and 
there, they go to prove the rule. We can 
no more ignore the history of medical and 
chemical science, the findings of the micro- 
scope and laboratory, without disaster, than 
we can cut our country off from the tradi- 
tions, laws and customs of yesterday with- 
out similar results. On the other hand, 
it is at least equal folly to flout or dis- 
credit the mystical experience of the ages. 
Human life, individually and corporately, 
is a unit, and due recognition must be given 
to all that goes to make it up. 

1 The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, pp. 57, 
58. 



CHAPTER III 

IN RELATION TO THOUGHT 

The mind includes the Mystic Sense in 
somewhat a similar way to the manner in 
which the body includes the physical senses. 
But the Mystic Sense can be, indeed must 
be, considered as a distinct faculty having 
a peculiar function in the formation of that 
product of the mind called thought, which 
is " the effort to win over facts to ideas, 
or to adjust ideas to facts." * The Mys- 
tic Sense can and does operate when the 
rationalizing faculty is reverently silent, 
and by its operation prepares new material 
for pure reason to consider. 

There is no specifically intellectual or- 
gan. It is the whole man which appre- 
hends knowledge just as it is the whole 
man and not an exclusively religious part 
of him, which apprehends and is appre- 
hended by eternities and infinities. It is 
popularly supposed that science and math- 

iRoYCE's The World and the Individual, First 
Scries, p. 58. 

52 



The Sixth Sense 53 

ematics call for the exercise of one set of 
faculties, and philosophy and religion an- 
other. Whereas the truth is that the same 
faculties are used for all alike in pretty 
much the same relation to one another. 
The Mystic Sense is as indispensable to sci- 
ence as it is to piety. Its method of opera- 
tion is precisely the same in the one sphere 
as in the other. 

We can best appreciate the important 
part the Mystic Sense plays in science by a 
survey of the foundations of accepted sci- 
entific fact. The whole body of our 
knowledge concerning the material uni- 
verse is constructed upon a few ultimates, 
chief among them being the ether and the 
atom. The physical senses, so busy in that 
workshop of science, the laboratory, cease 
to be important when we deal with these 
fundamentals. The discoverer of ether 
never perceived it by touch, taste, smell, 
sight or hearing. Newton postulated it be- 
cause he said it was a necessity, exactly as 
we postulate the existence of God. How 
could there be attraction across the meas- 
ureless spaces which separate worlds if 
there were not some intangible substance? 
The ether was therefore discovered to or- 
der by the Mystic Sense and accepted be- 



54 The Sixth Sense 

cause it proved a good working hypothesis. 
We are solemnly told by physicists that it is 
an " elastic solid/' a " pervasive fluid," a 
" tenuous substance." And yet when we 
chase this elusive something into a corner 
we find it to be "that which undulates," a 
form of motion — well, so is a field mouse ! 
Again the atomic theory, first conceived 
by the Greeks, was restated by Dalton more 
than 2,000 years later, who brought it 
down " from the clouds to the laboratory 
and factory." But neither Dalton nor 
anyone else ever touched an atom, saw an 
atom, heard an atom, smelt an atom, or 
tasted an atom, ultimate of matter that it 
is. The physicist claims, however, " that 
though he cannot handle or see them, the 
atoms and molecules are as real as the ice- 
crystals in the cirrhus clouds that he cannot 
reach — as real as the unseen members of 
a meteoric swarm whose death glow is lost 
in the sunshine, or which sweep past us 
unentangled in the night " — that the atoms 
are in fact " not merely helps to puzzled 
mathematicians, but physical realities." l 
All this may be so. Nevertheless both the 
ether and the atom are so little material 

1 See Macfie's Science, Matter and Immortality, an 
admirable volume on this entire topic. 



The Sixth Sense 55 

as to escape physical perception as com- 
pletely as a ghost, and so nearly spiritual 
as to be perceived by the Mystic Sense with 
sufficient clearness to enable the scientist 
to use them as his fundamental hypothesis. 
If this reasoning be true, the ultimate of 
matter is spiritual and not material ! 

As with the ether so with the atom, it 
was a scientific necessity. The Mystic 
Sense contributed it to the laboratory, 
where it has been contentedly accepted as 
the ultimate of matter, until the other day, 
when someone opened the window of the 
atom to discover that it was a huge uni- 
verse, of which a p corpuscle or electron 
was the least particle, related to the atom 
as a mote dancing in the sunbeam is to the 
room where it is. No sense but the Mys- 
tic Sense has yet sensed the electron. Not 
only, then, has science accepted the findings 
of the Mystic Sense, but, having accepted 
them, it has in the main not had reason to 
distrust them and continues confidently to 
base its research upon the foundation thus 
laid. 

The freshest of more recent scientific 
discoveries, evolution, is as much the child 
of the Mystic Sense as of inductive reason- 
ing. It was the Mystic Sense of ancient 



56 The Sixth Sense 

philosophers, exploring the unseen, whicK 
first descried it on the horizon as the sailor 
at the masthead spies the distant land. 
Darwin was the helmsman who steered the 
ship to port. He rationalized it and ap- 
plied it as a working hypothesis. It is in- 
structive to note that Darwin began his 
career with a rather acute sense of the mys- 
tical. He had a keen appetite for poetry, 
and pictures, and the music in King's Col- 
lege Chapel " gave him intense pleasure, 
so that his backbone would sometimes 
shiver." 1 He even began preparation for 
Holy Orders. In later life the interests 
that meant so much to him in youth died. 
" My mind," he says, u seems to have be- 
come a kind of machine for finding general 
laws out of large collections of facts, but 
why this should have caused the atrophy 
of that part of the brain alone, on which 
the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. 
A man with a mind more highly organized 
or better constituted than mine, would not, 
I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had 
to live my life again, I would have made 
a rule to read some poetry and listen to 
some music at least once a week; for per- 

1 Darwin's Autobiography. 



The Sixth Sense 57 

haps the parts of my brain now atrophied 
would thus have been kept active through 
use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of 
happiness, and may possibly be injurious 
to the intellect, and more probably to the 
moral character, by enfeebling the emo- 
tional part of our nature," It would be 
more accurate, perhaps, to explain this loss, 
not by atrophy but by too narrow special- 
ization. His Mystic Sense and powerful 
imagination were not dead. They were 
centred on a single object. Having de- 
veloped his Mystic Sense in one or all the 
ways open to him, a man may abandon its 
use in every direction but one. Christian 
worship, poetry, music prepare the Mystic 
Sense for that daring creation of hypoth- 
eses characteristic of Darwin. Without 
his power of hypothesis he could never have 
become more than a mere collector of the 
jackdaw order. He is his own best wit- 
ness to the truth of this assertion. He 
says, " I have steadily endeavored to keep 
my mind free so as to give up any hy- 
pothesis, however much beloved (and I 
cannot resist forming one on every sub- 
ject), as soon as facts are shown to be 
opposite to it," adding that he could not 



£8 The Sixth Sense 

remember " a single first formed hypoth- 
esis which had not after a time to be given 
up or modified." 

It is one of the chief functions of the 
Mystic Sense to present hypotheses. With- 
out hypothesis the reason is a shorn Sam- 
son. A goal must be postulated, otherwise 
the wood could not be seen for the trees, 
and the intellect would be hopelessly lost 
in a tangle of underbrush and smothered 
by the weight of its own learning. " While 
theory is aimless and impotent without ex- 
perimental check, experiment is dead with- 
out some theory passing beyond the limits 
of ascertained knowledge to control it. 
Here, as in all parts of natural knowledge, 
the immediate presumption is strongly in 
favor of the simplest hypothesis ; the main 
support, the unfailing clue, of physical sci- 
ence is the principle that, nature being a 
rational cosmos, phenomena are related on 
the whole in the manner that conceptual 
reason would anticipate." * Generalization 
of a tentative character precedes and 
gives a starting point for induction. Hy- 
pothesis is more often the child of intuitive 

1 Sir Joseph Larmor in his Wilde Lecture (1908) 
quoted by Sir Oliver Lodge in Reason and Belief, p. 
172. 



The Sixth Sense 59 

processes which capture thought by quick 
assault than of slower and more analyzable 
forces. First comes hypothesis, then the 
accumulation of data, finally, when all 
available evidence is in, rejection and the 
adoption of fresh hypothesis, or modifica- 
tion, or verification. " A bundle of dis- 
connected facts is only the raw material for 
an investigation: their mere collection is 
the very earliest stage in the process; and 
even while collecting them there is nearly 
always some system, some place, some idea 
under trial." * The spiritual contents of 
the physical universe are, in part, evolution, 
the ether, the atom and such like. They 
bear material names, but they are ideas, out 
of reach of our sensory nerves, and capable 
of being perceived, first dimly and then 
clearly, only through the Mystic Sense. 
They form the allegorical department of 
scientific thought, and are to the reality as 
the Apocalypse is to the Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

It would be without special gain, how- 
ever easy, to multiply illustrations of the 
princely place which the Mystic Sense holds 
in scientific research. Let us, therefore, 
turn for a moment to mathematics with its 

1 Reason and Belief, p. x8x. 



60 The Sixth Sense 

array of imperturbable digits and prosaic 
facts. No sooner does the mathematician 
begin to move, than he finds it necessary 
to call to his aid the self-same faculty, 
which furnishes the physicist with his ether 
and atoms, and enables the worshipper to 
pray. Else how could he explore the fifth 
dimension, and define a line as having 
length without breadth, or a plane su- 
perficies as having only length and breadth, 
or a point as having no parts? It 
is not astonishing that the mathemati- 
cian, " Lewis Carroll," was the author of 
those most delicious imaginative works 
of immortal fame, " Alice in Won- 
derland " and " Through the Looking- 
Glass." His vocation prepared and 
trained him for his avocation, and his avo- 
cation gave him new efficiency in his voca- 
tion. That which made him able to write 
the story of dreamland equipped him as an 
able scholar — the use in proper relation 
to his other mental gifts of the Mystic 
Sense. Similarly it is not surprising, but 
to be expected that Bacon, Pasteur, and 
Kelvin were, each in his own degree, re- 
ligious men. They are the normal men of 
science, La Place, Huxley, and Haeckel 



The Sixth Sense 6l! 

being eccentrics and developed in a lop- 
sided way. 

Invention, to turn to the department of 
practical science, relates the same story. 
Long before men saw, they dreamed. The 
locomotive was a vision before it was a 
fact; the aeroplane began as an idea, sting- 
ing men into adventurous experiment, be- 
fore it spread its wings above the earth; 
men talked across vast spaces in thought 
before the earliest cable ticked its message, 
or the wireless system enthralled us by its 
wizardry. The Mystic Sense is prophetic 
and sees to-morrow as though it were to- 
day, dimly first and then with increasing 
clearness. " Without much dim appre- 
hension, no clear perception; nothing is 
more certain than this." * 

Still once more, when we turn to litera- 
ture the Mystic Sense is a pole-star. His- 
tory is a museum of the curios of yesterday, 

1 The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. ii, p. 265. 

The author quotes Kant — "we can be mediately 
conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no 
distinct consciousness." " The field of our obscure 
apprehensions, — that is, apprehensions and impres- 
sions of which we are not directly conscious, although 
we can conclude without doubt that we have them — 
is immeasureable, whereas clear apprehensions con- 
stitute but a very few points within the complete ex- 
tent of our mental life." 



62 The Sixth Sense 

a pile of bones, a series of occurrences, a 
collection of bald facts as cold and bare 
as a heap of pebbles, until the Mystic Sense 
enters the sterile valley and brings with it 
the breath of life. An idiot with a mem- 
ory can collect past facts as easily as a wee 
toddler can collect shells on the sea shore 
and to as good purpose. But it needs a 
man who, however vast his stock of infor- 
mation, possesses a developed Mystic Sense 
to classify facts and reveal their insides. 
Facts never tell the truth to an unimag- 
inative mind. There is a higher form of 
accuracy and a deeper presentation of real- 
ity than a bare statement. Figures and 
prose, taken alone, are blind guides. 

In normal childhood the Mystic Sense 
gets admirable training through the poetry 
and imaginative literature that belongs to 
the nursery in every nation. It is justly 
considered improper to confine a child's 
education to the multiplication table, sci- 
entific statement, religious dogma, and the 
memorizing of historic fact. The kinder- 
garten, be its merits or defects what they 
may, is an endeavor to rouse the young 
mind to accurate observation and calcula- 
tion through the imaginative faculty. Al- 
legory, fable, and multiplied illustration 



The Sixth Sense 63 

form the natural vehicle for imparting 
knowledge to the young. The abstract is 
unintelligible, the bald is uninteresting; 
vivid description, poetical and highly col- 
ored, is the main road to knowledge. Care 
is taken to introduce fact in its best and 
prettiest clothing. Human life has a crav- 
ing for the beautiful which is a phase of 
strength and an aspect of the real. Litera- 
ture is the recorded expression of human 
life and thought, colored by the character 
of its various authors. 1 Art is literature 
on canvas, in vibrant sounds, and in stone. 
Poetry is a necessary and not an orna- 
mental part of literature. It is to a large 
extent the mystical embodiment of prose, 
or perhaps it would be truer to say that it 
bears somewhat the same relation to prose 
that hypothesis does to science. At any 
rate it is the distinctive literature of the 
Mystic Sense. It is the literature of the 
young nation just as much as it is of the 
young child. The earliest and the most 
permanent literature extant is either poetry 
or poetical in idea. Imagination, a child 

1 " Literature consists of those writings which in- 
terpret the meanings of nature and life in words of 
charm and power, touched with the personality of the 
author, in artistic forms of permanent interest." — Van 
Dyke's The Spirit of America, p. 243. 



64 The Sixth Sense 

of the Mystic Sense, which runs wild unless 
disciplined, was born earlier than more 
sober offspring of the mind. Poetry is the 
parent of prose. The habit of the nursery 
or schoolroom is the reproduction on a 
small scale of the method of history — 
first poetry, then prose. He rules a na- 
tion who furnishes it with songs. There 
is no firmer foundation for national life 
than a great legendary epic or a garland of 
folk songs. The better, if not the larger, 
part of the Old Testament is poetic. 
Even the historical books do not pretend 
to be history as Gibbon and Green are his- 
tory. Legend and history had not been 
distinguished from one another in those 
days. Legend is usually elaborately col- 
ored interpretation of fact where the ac- 
tual occurrence has been lost in the interpre- 
tation, to such an extent that it can never be 
recovered or can only be guessed at. By 
subjective process, somewhat akin to reflec- 
tion or digestion, the objective gains a new 
and transfigured self apart from and in- 
dependent, it may be, of the original ob- 
ject. Thus legend is over-subjectified his- 
tory. The outside is ignored for the sake 
of the inside. 

Poetry and wholesome fiction must find 



[The Sixth Sense 65 

permanent place in the life of a normal 
man. Do not delude yourself into think- 
ing that your chief or only guides in life 
are logic and sense perception. They are 
not. Intuition and sentiment lead you 
twice for every once these others do. It is 
so much more comfortable, not to say hon- 
est and reasonable, to acknowledge frankly 
the primacy of your leaders, than to follow 
them and pretend all the while that you are 
following other guides, which is a species 
of disloyalty. Scientist, inventor, mathe- 
matician, man of letters, alike are not quite 
true to fact when they claim that pure rea- 
son and an exclusive process of induction 
control their mental operations. I would 
raise the question whether there is any such 
thing as the exclusively inductive method. 
Is it not truer to speak of the deductive- 
inductive than of the inductive? The 
Mystic Sense, with its adventurous and 
sometimes blundering progress, holds so im- 
portant a place that without it logic and 
induction would be as grist without a mill. 
To reach knowledge by " pure reason " is 
as impossible as to reach the sun with a 
stepladder. Even supposing it were pos- 
sible to bring bare reason over against bald 
fact, the result would reach only a degree 



66 \The Sixth Sense 

beyond the achievement of a pig that 
counts, or a jackdaw that gathers a store 
of glittering objects. 

I have heard scrupulous people complain 
of the effect of fairy lore, nursery fables, 
and imaginative traditions like that of 
Santa Claus, upon child life. It may be a 
question to consider, but it is dealing with a 
mote rather than with a beam. Cheap 
current literature, and the psychologically 
false story, which is characteristic of many 
of our magazines, are far more of an in- 
jury to heart and mind than the imag- 
inative excesses of the nursery. The ob- 
jection to the latter is not in the substance, 
but in the unnecessary attempts to deceive 
and to confuse objective and subjective in 
the child mind. Santa Claus is a harmless 
creature viewed as the Spirit of Christmas. 
[When he is turned into a chimney god to 
whom written or spoken prayers are of- 
fered, it is another matter. Who can with- 
stand the pathos of the little sister's death, 
resulting from her petition before the fire- 
place for a new toy for her baby brother? 
The flames took her and turned her into a 
burnt sacrifice to Santa Claus. 

Supply is usually responsive to demand 
and the amount of imaginative literature 



The Sixth Sense 67 

and versifying in the journals of the day is 
a fair indication of the appetite for that 
which stimulates the Mystic Sense in let- 
ters. Also its hectic character is indica- 
tive of the wild state of the psychic life 
of the readers. The normal is counted 
uninteresting, and the abnormal, in inci- 
dent and character, is portrayed. A 
steady diet of such reading leaves unhealthy 
blotches, indelible and disfiguring, on hu- 
man life. Even in more serious literature 
the story of the abnormal may be given 
too great prominence. Valuable as the 
late Professor James's Varieties of Reli- 
gious Experience may be, it has the fault 
of studying the abnormal as though it were 
the ordinary, leaving the great stretches 
of healthy religious experience practically 
untouched. If a physiologist were to give 
his main attention to men with one green 
and one brown eye, or with the heart on 
the right instead of the left side, or some 
kindred peculiarities, the sum total of his 
research would not contribute much to our 
knowledge of the normal man. 

To conclude: every man who respects 
his mind, be his vocation what it may, has 
need to guard his Mystic Sense from de- 
filement, and afford it opportunity for de- 



68 The Sixth Sense 

velopment. In what is technically known 
as education great stress is laid on pro- 
portion and subject matter. This is no 
less a necessity in maturer life than it is 
in youth. The same result ensues upon 
reading anything that comes to hand, that 
ensues upon eating anything that comes 
to hand. So important a thing is it, not 
only that we should be able to create hy- 
potheses, but also that our hypotheses 
should be sound, that we must furnish our 
Mystic Sense with the same safeguards 
and stimulus that we afford our physical 
senses. 



CHAPTER IV 

IN RELATION TO CHARACTER 

Good character is the reaction upon the 
whole self caused by the Mystic Sense 
as a habit visioning, and the will claim- 
ing, the excellent. It is the result on per- 
sonality of a sustained effort to transcend 
the existing relation to life and its condi- 
tions, a state of chronic dissatisfaction with 
the progress and achievement of the mo- 
ment, which makes the good mediocre by 
contrasting it with the superior and cov- 
eting the best conceivable as man's right 
and heritage. 

The Mystic Sense is always finding a 
more excellent way. Excepting when 
taught to play casuistical tricks, it does not 
look for the conventionally proper, or rest 
comfortably in it. 1 It launches out into 

1 " The wealthy class in Rome and all over Italy- 
began to conform to that conventional code of pro- 
priety by which the rich seem always destined, in the 
progress of civilization, to become more and more 
enslaved, till finally they lost all feeling for what is 
serious and genuine in life. The new generation fol- 

69 



JO The Sixth Sense 

that noble freedom which, from a group 
of probabilities, selects that which is 
farthest removed from suspicion of self- 
ish considerations and promises ulti- 
mately the best social results. On the 
other hand it is not disregardful of the ac- 
cepted code of morals. This it takes as 
its foundation, individualizing it for per- 
sonal use, and boldly submitting proposi- 
tions for improvement to the social con- 
science for approval, modification, or 
rejection. Such approval, modification, or 
rejection is never a purely formal matter 
registered in the dictum of a tribunal but 
rather the culmination of a process akin, 
in the moral sphere, to that which is 
termed " natural selection " in the physical 
sphere. 

lowed their example with alacrity, and preached the 
new conventions with a passionate vehemence which 
must have been highly exasperating to those of their 
seniors who were still attached to the simplicity of 
primitive manners. Amongst those who protested 
against this development there was, however, one 
prominent figure of the younger age, Marcus Porcius 
Cato, a man of rich and noble family, and a de- 
scendant of Cato the Censor. His puritan spirit re- 
volted against the tyranny of fashion to which the 
golden youth of Rome wished to make him conform; 
he would walk in the streets without shoes or tunic, 
to accustom himself, as he said, only to blush at things 
which were shameful in themselves, and not merely 
by convention." — Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of 
Rome, vol. i, pp. 135, 136. 



The Sixth Sense Jl 

Character and morality are not synon- 
ymous. Strong character may be good 
or bad, the latter being the result of the 
active exercise of the will in a conflict with 
goodness; it is the transformation of evil 
from a mere negation into a positive, per- 
sonal force by conscious volition. But our 
study is of good character and its culti- 
vation, so that when the word " character " 
is used the determinative " good " is un- 
derstood. 

Character is the result of the corre- 
spondence of personality with the best that 
it knows. It is measured by the faithful- 
ness with which it responds to opportu- 
nity. A man with small opportunity, who 
is scrupulously conscientious in availing 
himself of all the privilege afforded him, 
becomes a stronger character than another, 
who, with his great opportunity, is less 
loyal in his use of it. Of course the great- 
est character is that which knows ideal 
virtue and consistently aims to bring up 
life to its level. Character is determined 
by reaction upon environment, external 
and internal. There are many suitable 
environments possible for every character, 
more than there are unsuitable ones, as the 
vicissitudes of most lives testify. Char- 



72 The Sixth Sense 

acter is thus bound up closely with individ- 
ual personality and is never abstract, as 
morality is in the science of ethics. Char- 
acter is created and disclosed by that phase 
of experience in which the Mystic Sense is 
busied in photographing ideals on the film 
monopolized by the actual to the discom- 
fiture and obliteration of the latter. 
Better to-morrows are obtruded on poor 
to-days, partly by virtue of the fact that 
the Mystic Sense is naturally in constant 
contact with the ideally best, sensing and 
appropriating it just as the body, without 
conscious effort on our part, senses and ap- 
propriates light and air, and partly be- 
cause, either feebly or vigorously, most 
men claim for themselves by deliberate 
volition a larger life than that which is. 

The possession of character is the sole 
justification of self-respect. Self-respect 
ensues upon the growth of character, and 
is to character what perfume is to the 
flower. It is due to the consciousness of 
having within ourselves that which is 
worthy — not mere moral acquiescence but 
something we have made peculiarly our 
own by active effort. It is a high form 
of the consciousness which inspires an in- 
ventor when he has constructed a piece 



The Sixth Sense 73 

of mechanism. Self-respect is a witness 
to our having been individualized and is 
indifferent to external possessions or aught 
that is our own by virtue of favor and 
chance rather than by merit. Self-respect 
runs into self-conceit and stagnation when 
it rests content with that which is. It 
never dawdles in its movements nor loafs 
on the street corners. Self-respect be- 
comes self-contempt and self-abasement 
when our attention is turned from our cher- 
ished ideals and actual progress, and fixed 
upon our defects and failures. Penitence 
is not a bar but a necessity to character 
and its fragrant effluence, self-respect. 

Character calls for and expects commu- 
nal respect in the same degree that it re- 
ceives self-respect. Reputation should 
be commensurate with character. It is 
possible for men to have the unmerited 
respect of their fellows without having 
self-respect. This is due to the practice 
of deceit, conscious or unconscious, which 
enables them to simulate character and 
have appearance without corresponding re- 
ality. To the man of character, it is as 
truly a pain to be overestimated as to be 
underestimated. He can afford to lose 
his reputation, though he can never be 



74 The Sixth Sense 

exempt from the keen pain involved. In 
the process of achieving character, the 
great frequently, if not always, have to 
endure the withholding of respect on the 
part of the community. Seldom does a 
man make a contribution to progress with- 
out being temporarily at least discredited 
by those whom most of all he is aiming 
to benefit. Self-respect towers at such mo- 
ments. A man of character will trust him- 
self when all men doubt him but make al- 
lowance for their doubting, too; he will 
wait and not be tired by waiting, or being 
lied about, won't deal in lies, or being 
hated won't give way to hating. 1 

Ideals become tasks and tasks become 
character in social experience. " A tal- 
ent," says Goethe, " shapes itself in still- 
ness, but a character in the tumult of the 
world." " That which would have re- 
mained only a quality in (our Lord), if 
He had stayed in the desert, becomes a 
life when He goes forth into the world." 
The ultimate test of a man's worth is his 
character and not his degree of morality 
— his power of volitional reaction upon 
environment, objective and subjective. 

Every man at some time during his ca* 
1 Kipling's //— . 



The Sixth Sense J$ 

reer, — most men for a considerable por- 
tion of it, and many from beginning to end, 
— covets character. Those who fail to 
claim it for themselves seldom fail to ad- 
mire it in others. Frequently they put as 
much effort into pretending they have it as 
would win for them the real thing. They 
pay the price of gold for tinsel. Character 
has commercial value and sometimes 
men are honest according to law solely 
because it is politic, or polite accord- 
ing to social requirement because it pays. 
But the honesty and courtesy of such 
men are not virtues. They are hand- 
maidens of covetousness. They contrib- 
ute nothing to self-respect. They have no 
moral content, and serve only to aid in bol- 
stering up a vicious characteristic. How- 
ever, it is a tribute to the kingliness of 
character that, either for its market value 
or because of its inherent worth, men 
clothe themselves in its appearance when 
they do not seek the substance. 

The substance may be had by every 
man. Man not only is, but also acknowl- 
edges himself to be, responsible for what 
he is. He makes the confession when he 
keeps his worst self from the public gaze 
even though it promises him no special 



j6 The Sixth Sense 

gain. The extreme to which the sense of 
personal responsibility and accountability 
goes is evidenced by the fact that, though 
for others we find it difficult to believe 
in the closing of the possibility of self-im- 
provement and ultimate loss fixed and final, 
many, perhaps most of us, think and act in 
our own case as though we at least shall 
be held strictly accountable for our char- 
acter and reap as we live. If we had no 
responsibility for what we were and did, 
there would be no room for shame, were 
we to be publicly known to be exactly what 
we are. Rob Henley's poem of its de- 
fiant note and we are in the presence of 
sober fact: 

"It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll — 
I am the Master of my fate — 
I am the Captain of my soul." 

Character, like fruit, gets rich flavor 
through living in a climate of extremes 
which give robustness by theatening very 
existence. The story of the transgression 
of Adam and his consort is illustrative 
rather than singular. The temptation set 
was the very stiffest to which human life, 
being what it is, could be subjected — a 
demand for self-discipline and obedience 



'{The Sixth Sense JJ 

to mysterious law. It is interesting that 
the first recorded strain put upon the hu- 
man will was not to do rather than to do. 
Seemingly it was the limitation of free- 
dom, the restriction of choice, the nar- 
rowing of experience. In no other condi- 
tions could man have had a chance to 
gain character. Had our first human an- 
cestors won their day without lapse, every 
succeeding generation would have had to 
do the same. You cannot inherit char- 
acter. You must win it. Temptation is 
never eliminated from human life, as we 
know it. Its conquest in one form opens 
the door to its appearance in another form. 
Our earliest human ancestors having 
known the higher chose the lower. But 
this did not, either in their own case or in 
that of their offspring through a thousand 
generations, close the door to the attain- 
ment of character. Human life begins in 
conditions which threaten character and 
therefore becomes eligible for character. 
The complaint that there are those in the 
world who, because of hopeless environ- 
ment, never have an opportunity, finds 
sympathetic echo in every heart, but it does 
not absolve us from responsibility to our 
own opportunity. 



78 The Sixth Sense 

Much is made of heredity by those who 
know little or nothing of the controversies 
which gather about the study of its opera- 
tion. The popular interpretation presses 
hard upon its thorns and forgets even the 
existence of its blossoms. " The sins of 
the fathers are visited upon the children 
unto the third and fourth generation," is 
the dominating thought which, by exclu- 
sive consideration, diseases the mind of 
many a man until his whole imaginative 
nature is employed in the service of some 
congenital, or supposed congenital, weak- 
ness to make him its victim. In this way 
fatalism is induced. Fatalism is a disease 
of the Mystic Sense which substitutes ac- 
quiescence for reaction. It is the straw 
committing itself to the river, not the oars- 
man using the current to his own advan- 
tage. Acquiescence is too tame a virtue 
for man, if indeed it be a virtue at all. 

Whatever credit we give to heredity 
for endowing us with the tendencies of our 
evil forbears, we must give it equal credit 
for endowing us with those of our good 
forbears. If you are determined to be 
fatalistic, be so fairly, recognizing the pos- 
sible transmission of every kind of ten- 
dency. Conscious acceptance of gifts of 



The Sixth Sense 79 

strength from the past is a powerful coun- 
ter-irritant to defend us against a real or 
imagined inheritance of weakness. 

The problem of heredity is obscured by 
the fog of controversy which just now 
envelopes it. We must remember that the 
main questions in doubt are its method, 
and extent, and our ability to intervene so 
as to modify or improve its operations. 
Science very cautiously says that " heredity 
suggests, though it would be rash to say 
it is proved, that man is almost entirely 
the product of inborn factors which are 
hardly affected by [physical] environ- 
ment." * " Given parents of certain con- 
stitution, it can be said with confidence 
that on the average a certain proportion 
of their offspring will have such and such 
characters." " Both [the Biometrician 
and Mendelian] agree that what is pres- 
ent in the germ-cell will be present in the 
individual, and that external conditions as 
a rule play but a small part in determin- 
ing its appearance." " Almost entirely," 
11 hardly affected," " on the average," " a 
certain proportion," " as a rule," form a 
relatively large group of qualifying clauses 

1 Doncaster , s Heredity in the Light of Recent Re- 
search (1910), p. 113 ff. 



80 The Sixth Sense 

in three short sentences. When we know 
more certainly the mechanism by which 
heredity operates we shall be better able 
by eugenics and physiological or mechan- 
ical processes to combat its evils and foster 
its benefits. In the meantime there is no 
call for us to stand idle. If man were 
mere animal it would be another matter, 
but he is not. His Mystic Sense, which 
links him to a superior order, has steadily 
differentiated him from all below him. It 
has enabled him to transcend environment. 
By means of it he can acquire character 
even if the laws of transmission should 
forbid him to pass it on to his offspring 
by congenital endowment. It is a finer 
and stronger thing to improve steadily the 
tradition of family or race by a series of 
successive personal conquests and achieve- 
ments than to gain exemption from evil 
tendencies by the more or less mechanical 
process of procreation. Release from 
temptation is not necessarily a benefit, and 
is never as productive of character as the 
gift of ability to defeat it. Frequently 
all that is needed is inspiration, mystical 
and human, to enable a man to rise above 
his evil inheritance and habit. Evil tra- 
dition is as real and destructive a phase of 



The Sixth Sense 81 

heredity as inborn weakness, whereas on 
the other hand noblesse oblige. It is 
rather the tradition of the family trait of 
intemperance than a transmitted physical 
peculiarity that keeps the line of drunkards 
unbroken. Children must not be allowed 
to suppose that they can be excused from 
struggle. Being prepared for all tempta- 
tions as a normal part of experience they 
are least likely to become victims of any: 
being made expectant of all virtues, they 
may perchance glean some. 

Our environment is our opportunity, 
particularly in those spots where it is un- 
congenial and threatening. To chafe and 
fret is to increase the inimical possibilities 
of difficulty. To think of it except with 
the intention of mastering it is weakening 
and depressing. To remove it with our 
own hands rather than have another re- 
move it, if it be moveable, or, should it be 
immoveable, to weave it as material into 
our scheme of life, using its rough threads 
to the last stand, is to achieve character. 
A man must either fit his burden to his 
back or his back to his burden, if he de- 
sires to remain man. They are rare ex- 
ceptions in mankind who have not capacity 
for so doing, if not by themselves, at any 



Sz The Sixth Sense 

rate in a sympathetic social setting. A 
burdened life by the free use of the Mystic 
Sense may become a privileged life. In- 
troduce fearlessness and experimental curi- 
osity into hardship, and you get romance 
which keeps the wings of life moving and 
mounting, and makes the world of men 
around look up in aspiring wonder. 

"There is no storme but this 
Of your owne Cowardise 

That braves you out; 
You are the storme that mocks 
Your selves; you are the rocks 

Of your owne doubt: 
Besides this feare of danger, ther's no 

danger here; 
And he that here feares danger, does de- 
serve his feare." 1 

The Mystic Sense has an inner ear. 
Through it conscience delivers its message 
by means of which we come to know and 
understand the meaning of ought and 
ought not. Ready response to conscience 
is to be coveted above all things, especially 
where conscience has been trained and 
illumined. A friend once wrote me, a few 
days before his death, that he had come 
to see that what pretended to be education 

1 Crashaw. 



The Sixth Sense 83 

was no education at all unless it included 
the development of conscience. But mere 
knowledge of right and wrong, ought and 
ought not, does not impart goodness. To 
be aware that vice injures and virtue 
blesses is desirable but insufficient. There 
is not less vice among those who know 
than there is among those who do not 
know ethics, other things being equal, ex- 
cepting where education is conceived to 
be something more than the imparting of 
information. 

Sometimes nations and individuals covet 
character without being ready to pay the 
whole price for it. They give admirable 
facilities for the development of certain 
phases of training essential to character, 
but exclude that deciding factor which de- 
termines whether or not they may be 
woven into character. Influences from 
other sources may come in to repair wil- 
ful neglect, but, if not, the training goes 
for nothing so far as character is con- 
cerned. Public schools can never give 
character its best opportunity without a 
practical recognition of religion. Purely 
secular education, the imparting of learn- 
ing including the science of ethics, without 
religion in church and home to supplement 



84 The Sixth Sense 

it, is a doubtful blessing at best. The cur- 
rent idea of secular education is not new. 
During the French Revolution its leaders 
mapped out what appeared to be a satis- 
factory programme of instruction. It was 
desired to have moral training, first with- 
out religion or with the " Worship of 
Reason," then with a minimum of reli- 
gion. The priests were suffered to continue 
as being at any rate moral policemen, but 
Danton planned to supplant them by 0/- 
ficiers de morale. All experiments were 
of no avail. "La morale populaire 
. cherche encore" it was pathet- 
ically complained, " un point d'appui 
solide" Then came freedom to worship, 
and later the Concordat reintroduced the 
old religious order, partially, it is true, be- 
cause the people could or would not live 
without it, but largely for the sake of 
morals. 

If religion without morality becomes 
superstitious sentiment, morality without 
religion becomes for the average man in- 
operative ethics and ultimately a pitiless 
judge. There is no more oppressive ty- 
rant than a high ethical code with a will, 
untrained, uninspired, and helpless to re- 
spond. It becomes a mocking and cruel 



(The Sixth Sense 85 

Nemesis viewing with indifference its 
writhing victims. The Chinese Classics 
are preserved by the wonderful nation who 
produced them, as a literary treasure in- 
stead of as a practical code of conduct — 
the sure fate of the Bible apart from the 
Christian Church. 

It is too late in the day to pretend that 
morality and religion are synonymous, 
however intimate their relationship, or that 
the end of religion is to make men good. 
Righteousness, which is the Christian term 
for morality, is to be had only in part by 
the practice of embracing the excellent and 
bathing our mystic self in the fountain of 
ideals. The type of righteousness thus 
created can never be aught than self-con- 
scious, like an overdressed woman, or a 
gaudy painting. The Mystic Sense must 
occupy itself in still higher altitudes. 
Having come from God and being partaker 
of His nature, it must aspire to Him. 
The end of life is religion, and the end 
of religion is to know God. The pur- 
est type of righteousness, experienced 
or conceivable, is created by our having as 
our dominant ambition to know the only 
God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. 
The net result is Christian Character. 



CHAPTER V 

IN RELATION TO RELIGION 

The operation of the Mystic Sense in re- 
lation to religion is commonly called faith , 
Conversely, faith under another name is 
that operation of the Mystic Sense which 
promotes health of body, which affords a 
starting point for all intellectual, scientific, 
and other productive pursuits, which leads 
character from strength to strength. The 
subjective conditions under which, and the 
spheres in which, the Mystic Sense is em- 
ployed, differ. But the faculty itself and 
its modus operandi are always the same. 
Just as the sense of bodily sight which 
views the dirt beneath our feet is the same 
sense which contemplates the blue sky, so 
the inner sense of sight which perceives 
an electron, an ideal, or a hypothesis is the 
same sense which sees God. It is as possi- 
ble to see God as to see a hypothesis, and 
as possible (not more and probably less), 
to see a hypothesis as to see God. 1 

1 A hypothesis receives passively our quest : God 
moves to meet us. 

86 



The Sixth Sense 87 

It is fitting that the most exalted opera- 
tion of the Mystic Sense should be dignified 
by a distinctive term, provided that in so 
doing no room is given for the implication 
that there is a faculty, or set of faculties, 
used in religion alone. A man has reli- 
gious capacity because he is man, and not 
because he is a specially favored individual 
of his kind. Man, unless he abdicates 
his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge 
on the impossible, must live by his Mystic 
Sense; he must keep touch with the un- 
seen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, 
rounded and proportioned, complete and 
splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not 
merely here and there but everywhere. 
The Mystic Sense has as true an existence 
in the whole personality, and relation to it, 
as the physical sense of touch, and is as 
acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the 
spiritual phase of reality as the body is to 
that of the material. It is analogous to 
all the sub-divisions of the nervous system 
but chiefly to sight and hearing, the most 
distinguished of the senses. 1 

To perceive an ideal is as real a sensa- 
tion as to look at a flower. An impression 

1 Newman in his Dream of Gerontius endows the 
disembodied soul with perceptive powers analogous 



88 The Sixth Sense 

is left behind not unlike the photograph of 
the flower retained on the retina of the 
eye and revived by act of memory and 
will. But the visualizing has nothing to 

to those of the body, saving only the sense of sight. 
Thus: 

SouL "I cannot of thy music rightly say 

Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones." 

. . . " How comes it then 

That I am hearing still, and taste, and 

touch, 
Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense 
Which binds ideas in one, and makes them 

live?" 
Angel. "Nor touch nor taste, nor hearing hast thou 

now; 
Thou livest in a world of signs and types, 
The presentation of most holy truths, 
Living and strong, which now encompass 

thee. 
A disembodied soul, thou hast by right 
No converse with aught beside thyself; 
But, lest so stern a solitude should load 
And break thy being, in mercy are vouch- 
safed 
Some lower measures of perception, 
Which seem to thee, as though through 

channels brought, 
Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which 

are gone. 

How, even now, the consummated Saints 
See God in heaven, I may not explicate; 
Meanwhile, let it suffice thee to possess 
Such means of converse as are granted thee, 
Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art 
blind." 

The idea underlying the Beatific Vision is the com- 
plete apprehension of God by the complete man. 



The Sixth Sense 89 

do with physical sense perception, and the 
part of the personality thus impressed is 
spiritual. To characterize tactual sensa- 
tion of the body as real necessitates a like 
characterization of the tactual sensation of 
the spirit. If it be argued that in the 
latter relationship there is no certainty as 
to what is phantasm and what reality, let 
it be remembered that the history of sci- 
ence is largely a series of corrections of 
imperfect sense records. A highly devel- 
oped power of observation with ability for 

Sight is chosen to denote this bliss because it is a 
princely co-ordinating sense, and our Lord spoke of 
the heritage of the pure in heart as being the vision 
of God, a heritage let it be noted, however, for now 
and not merely for hereafter. It seems reasonable to 
suppose that our powers of perception after death will 
be those mystic powers which we enjoy and use now, 
though then they will be rapidly developed as being 
our only perceptive powers. 

This suggests the investigation in progress of 
psychic phenomena by scientific methods. The re- 
sult may lead to an increase of our knowledge re- 
garding the nature of such phenomena. But I do not 
see how, if communication with the departed be pos- 
sible at all, we can expect to reach, and be reached 
by, them except through the Mystic Sense. The in- 
vocation of Saints seems to me more in line with 
what is probable than some of the experiments of the 
day. Disembodied spirits presumably approximate 
the nature of God and can approach or be ap- 
proached only after a purely spiritual or mystical 
fashion, excepting in those rare psycho-physical in- 
stances which are themselves contingent upon a 
highly developed mystical character and experience. 



90 The Sixth Sense 

accurate registration and correlation is the 
distinguishing feature of culture. The 
Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, is ca- 
pable of increasingly accurate perception 
by skilful and disciplined use. It takes 
its beginnings in gropings like the awk- 
ward jerks of a baby's limbs, and develops 
into ordered and reliable movement by 
exercise and experiment, which includes mis- 
takes and the profit accruing to the experi- 
ence. Superstition bears the same relation 
to faith that a false scientific hypoth- 
esis bears to ascertained fact. The Mys- 
tic Sense in its infant working catches a 
distorted view of the ideal, as when Dar- 
win propounded his conception of heredity 
by pangenesis, and leads us astray in 
science; in like manner in religion a 
glimpse, through a mist of ignorance and 
moral deficiency, of the Absolute, eventu- 
ates in superstition. Both are necessary 
stages in the training of the Mystic Sense. 
Similarly to the way in which the theory 
of pangenesis stimulated discussion and 
research so as to aid the Mystic Sense to a 
more accurate perception of the true hy- 
pothesis of the manner of heredity, the 
superstitions of the nations conceived in 
sincerity, crude and even repulsive though 



The Sixth Sense 91 

they be, have contributed to the complete 
knowledge of God and His character 
which forms our most valuable heritage. 

It is not hazardous to say that the ideals 
and hypotheses which are still waiting for 
the cognition of the Mystic Sense transcend 
gloriously those thus far apprehended. 
This means that science is in its infancy. 
It is equally true to assert that religion, 
so far from having fallen into decline, is 
but girding itself to scale heights impatient 
to feel the tread of human feet. That 
which is good and true in itself must per- 
sist, whatever its crudeness and blemishes. 
The Mystic Sense in relation to religion 
is only at the beginning of its history. 
Human, that is mystic, life began at so re- 
mote a period as to be beyond the reach 
of research. The operation of the Mystic 
Sense through many thousands of years * 
prior to human records led the way to that 
ordered approach to God which we call 
religion. The possibilities of its growth 
for the race at large are indicated and em- 
phasized by individual instances taken from 
the common crowd. The world is just at 
this moment engrossed in seeing that every 

1 Progressive civilization may be said to have be- 
gun 8,000 B. C. 



92 The Sixth Sense 

one should have an opportunity of develop- 
ing fine physique and of acquiring informa- 
tion. It is assumed that under proper 
conditions a high average may be reached. 
The same is to be postulated for the devel- 
opment of the Mystic Sense in relation to 
the highest and best in religion. Under a 
sufficient stimulus the average man will be 
able to apprehend what now is reached 
only by a minority. This, however, can 
not come to pass until a whole world of 
men strain their inner eye and quicken 
their inner ear in the same direction, each 
contributing of his own strength to the rest, 
and all to each. 

The history of Christianity and its im- 
mediate progenitor, Judaism, is the record 
of the highest development of the Mystic 
Sense in religion. In the course of its 
progress the Absolute rises from a dim 
shadow to the greatest Reality. It is dis- 
tinctively the religion of orderly and ra- 
tional mysticism. At first, men, feeling 
the working of the Mystic Sense, used it in 
a childish way. What was splendid in 
them would be culpable in us. Abraham 
could consider it a call of God to slay his 
son : a man of to-day could only think of it 
as a monstrous crime against God and so- 



The Sixth Sense 93 

ciety, revolting even to contemplate. It 
marked a stage in the rationalizing of faith 
when at the last moment Abraham saw 
mystically that it was not God's purpose 
that any human being should ever do at 
His bidding an inhuman deed. 

The most perfect individual life of faith 
ever lived was that of Jesus Christ. His 
Mystic Sense never erred. He was never 
so exclusively Divine as not to be com- 
pletely human. He was God living the 
life of man. He walked by faith, not by 
sight. Visions and ecstasies found rare 
and momentary place in His experience. 
He reached His goal by the use of those 
gifts and endowments which we have in 
common with Him, and proclaimed for- 
ever to the race of men that it is the sim- 
ple, steady, patient exercise of the Mystic 
Sense toward a God who is revealed as 
Love, which exalts human life and puts it 
in the way of winning incomparable power 
and beauty. His reply to the query, What 
shall we do, that we might work the works 
of God, is, This is the work of God, that 
ye believe — believe on Him whom He 
hath sent. Further, He makes the as- 
tounding prophecy, Assuredly I announce 
that he that believeth on me, the works 



94 The Sixth Sense 

that I do shall he do also; and greater 
works than these shall he do. The early 
Christians were distinguished from their 
fellows as men who exhibited in high de- 
gree the faculty of belief so as to be in a 
unique sense " Believers," and their re- 
ligion was one in which faith played so 
prominent a part as to merit the name of 
" The Faith." The whole Christian era 
has been an era of faith or the exercise of 
the Mystic Sense. No great work can be 
found in it, in science, literature or religion 
which has not been made possible by the 
stimulus given to faith by the influence of 
Jesus. Miracles do not cease to be mirac- 
ulous when they cease to be mysterious, and 
the Christian centuries are strewn with such 
miracles — many of them, works of heal- 
ing and moral restoration, as great as those 
of Jesus. But the greater works than His 
still lie before us when we have sufficiently 
shed materialism and committed ourselves 
more implicitly to the life of faith. 1 

x Two things must be remembered in connection 
with the interpretation of Jno. xiv ff. In the first 
place, these chapters, bursting as they are with 
startling promises which the critic claims have not 
been made good, were addressed to a select and 
specially trained group of followers. For instance, 
Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, 
constitutes a promise that could not have been made 



The Sixth Sense 95 

The disappearance into the spirit world 
of Jesus has made that world human, 1 so 
that the Mystic Sense can be as truly at 
home in it as it is in scientific research. 
He prepared for His withdrawal thither 
by centring the attention of His friends 
upon it. His manifestations after His 
death on the cross were primarily to the 
Mystic Sense of His followers. That is 
to say, those unaccustomed to use the Mys- 
tic Sense in a religious way were incapable 
of seeing Him. It was impossible for 
Him to show Himself to the irreligious or 
enemies of God. This does not mean that 

to a heterogeneous crowd. It presupposes an under- 
standing of the mind of Christ that keeps prayer 
within its appointed limits. A promise of this sort 
made to a St. John would be fulfilled, whereas it 
could not be fulfilled in the case of a man who 
thought that a prayer for the success of his lottery 
ticket, or the triumph of a competitive business scheme 
stained with dishonor, might be offered in the name 
of Jesus. In the second place, these chapters were 
written down and became accepted Scripture not 
less than three quarters of a century after they were 
spoken, by one who, in common with like-minded 
companions, had experienced the faithfulness of our 
Lord's promises. These men knew them to be true, 
not merely because our Lord had said them, but also 
because Christian experience, had verified them. This 
is so of the entire Gospel record. # That was remem- 
bered and recorded which Christian experience had 
verified. 

1 Similarly His advent into our human world made 
it Divine. 



96 The Sixth Sense 

it was only to the Mystic Sense of believers 
that He manifested Himself, but also to 
their bodily senses by way of the Mystic 
Sense. There is much that comes to the 
cognizance of the Mystic Sense through 
physical perception, and unless there is a 
refined and cultured nervous organism 
there is no mystical connotation. A Peter 
Bell could not find the mystical in nature. 

"A primrose by a river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more." 

The same primrose to a Linnaeus or an 
Asa Gray would reveal an unseen world. 
Conversely, there are some things which 
cannot affect our physical being except by 
the way of mystical experience. Striking 
instances of this sort have been suitably 
termed by von Hiigel " psycho-physical." 
They are possible only where there is ex- 
traordinary sympathy between the mystical 
and physical, the latter having been made 
very completely the servant of the former. 
Only the mystic, or the specialist in the 
use of the Mystic Sense, is eligible for such 
experiences. The tremendously real fel- 
lowship with the Risen Lord of the dis- 
ciples was of an ecstatic or psycho-physical 



The Sixth Sense 97 

order. It degrades the Resurrection man- 
ifestations to overemphasize their physical 
reality as though this, rather than the 
mystical, were the important feature. 
Their dominant note is spiritual. The 
physical perception came through the mys- 
tical. The experience of the disciples 
could not be reproduced in after times with 
other men, for the necessary conditions 
were wanting. Here and there among 
spiritual giants there is a well authenticated 
psycho-physical experience, but it is of 
phenomenal rather than of spiritual or- 
moral value. And yet it is within our 
power to see the Christ as really and ef- 
fectively as the Apostles did, though not 
wholly after the same manner. 

St. Paul did not begin his life of faith 
when he had his psycho-physical experience 
ori the road to Damascus. He reached 
there a turning point in its history. He 
was converted, turning his mystic powers 
in a new direction. Those who were with 
him were not sufficiently developed to see 
all that he saw or hear all that he heard. 1 
His vision of Jesus was momentary but 
his life of faith was continuous. If faith 
was at its beginning when Abraham made 

1 Acts ix, 7; xxii, 9. 



98 The Sixth Sense 

his venture, it reached an illustrative and 
inviting climax when St. Paul made his. 
It was greater for St. Paul to espouse the 
cause of the Christ than to have a vision 
of Jesus. The phenomenal or extraordi- 
nary does not always culminate in such 
courage and devotion as his. It was be- 
cause he was a mystic that he had his vision, 
not because he had a vision that he became 
a mystic. The Apostles who knew Jesus 
in the flesh had a lesser opportunity for 
faith than St. Paul who saw Him but once 
and then after psycho-physical fashion, and 
who never apprehended Him with all his 
bodily senses like those who saw " with 
their eyes " and " beheld," and whose 
" hands handled " the Word of Life. It 
was fitting that St. Paul should give Chris- 
tianity the impetus which made it a world 
religion. The highest development of 
faith has assigned to it the biggest under- 
taking. St. Peter with undeveloped intel- 
lectual gifts and faith based on sight could 
not do what St. Paul with highly developed 
reason and singular faith could do. The 
Risen Jesus Himself declared that faith 
dependent upon physical or psycho-physical 
experience is of a lower order than that in 
which the mystic sense is independent of 



The Sixth Sense 99 

phenomenal action of the bodily sense — 
Because thou hast seen me, thou hast be- 
lieved: blessed are they that have not seen, 
and yet have believed. 

The great multitude of mortals will al- 
ways be outside of psycho-physical expe- 
riences. There is no religious loss in the 
fact. Rather the contrary. That which 
gives the soul its permanent hold upon 
moral and spiritual realities and regard for 
them in mystics is not their rare psycho- 
physical experiences, but the same exercise 
of the Mystic Sense in the daily round of 
commonplace religious duty which is open 
to every human being, with like wonderful 
results upon character. A phenomenal 
spiritual occurrence in the case of one who 
was not living a religious life would be a 
mere wonder, perhaps even productive of 
spiritual harm. 1 Such experiences are 
never to be sought for. If they come 
their peril is not less than their inspiration. 

"The trivial round, the common task, 
Will furnish all we need to ask, 
Room to deny ourselves, a road 
To bring us daily nearer God." 

1 The miracles of Moses before Pharaoh are illus- 
trative of that which abounds in history — wonders 
hardening further an irreligious life. 



ioo The Sixth Sense 

It is a great barrier to religious effort 
among the crowd, for those living the life 
of faith, to give the impression that their 
experience is one of a series of ecstasies. 
It is no more so than is that of a student 
of science or higher mathematics. It is 
the life of faith open to all men which 
forms the religious life of the best men 
and the best religious life of all men — 
the constant placing of God before the 
Mystic Sense in a way not dissimilar from 
that in which the scientist approaches his 
hypothesis. 

"Think not the Faith by which the just shall live 
Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, 
Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, 
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given; 
It is an affirmation and an act 
That bids eternal truth be present fact." 

Though the Mystic Sense is not the sole 
religious faculty, it holds the primacy here 
as in every distinctively human activity. 
Used with reason its operation becomes 
reasonable or rational faith. Its opposite 
is not reason but sight, that is to say, the 
unaided findings of the bodily senses of 
which sight, being the most princely, is 
representative. Hence St. Paul's con- 



The Sixth Sense 101 

trast — we walk by faith, not by sight 
Even here it is hardly fair to say there is 
antagonism. Sight is the enemy of faith 
only when it refuses to be an ally. Sight 
sees, faith in-sees and therefore fore- 
sees. Sight has boundaries which it can- 
not pass. Faith has horizons which re- 
treat as it advances. 

Faith has become increasingly rational 
as the world has grown older and experi- 
ence has been added to experience. Its 
explorations in the world of ideals have 
been more frequent and daring with the 
advance of time. Consequently the man 
of to-day makes his flights thitherwards 
with a fulness of assurance on rational 
grounds or grounds of high probability 
which would have been impossible to an 
Abraham. If the triumphs open to faith 
have mutiplied, so have the deterrent forces 
holding it back or set in battle array to 
thwart or otherwise impair it. The com- 
monest injury wrought upon faith is the 
deflecting of it from the worthy to the 
unworthy or less worthy. If a man's 
Mystic Sense, acute in other directions, is 
dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason 
is usually to be found, I think, in circum- 
stances analogous to those which make a 



102 The Sixth Sense 

student of belles lettres, for instance, in- 
different to science, or a philosopher care- 
less of the exploits of commerce, cases of 
which are not wanting. The mind finds 
higher pleasure among certain persons in 
being exclusive and technical than in being 
catholic. So the Mystic Sense can fall 
short of its highest employment simply be- 
cause there is not in its possessor the will 
to employ it commensurately with its ca- 
pacity. The explanation why some men 
are not actively religious must be sought 
elsewhere than in the contention that they 
are short a faculty. The Mystic Sense, 
which by virtue of their humanity they 
possess, is not employed by them reli- 
giously from whatever reason — defective 
interest, prejudice, antagonism, environ- 
ment. Nevertheless the same inner sense 
is pushed to its fullest activity in other 
directions. The faculty which by a daring 
leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, 
or with imaginative subtlety suggests the 
plot of a novel, is the selfsame one which 
enables us to say, " Our Father, which art 
in heaven." The consideration of vicious 
men who are irreligious does not come 
within the purview of this discussion. Re- 
ligion and vice are mutually exclusive, 



The Sixth Sense 103 

though piety and immorality are not, so 
that we have the anomaly of immoral char- 
acter revelling in pious practices. 

One thing remains to be said. The use 
of the Mystic Sense in religion, more per- 
haps than in any other sphere, cannot be- 
gin and end in individualism. It is 
requisite for each to submit the results 
of his mystic excursions and explorations 
to the conclusions of the most advanced 
religion. Mystic observation and experi- 
ence must have the support and purifica- 
tion of universal mystic experience that 
will distinguish between the false and the 
true, phantasm and reality, and deliver 
the individual from eccentricity and ex- 
travagance. In other words, a church is 
more necessary than a chamber of com- 
merce, a national government, or an acad- 
emy of science. Mystic experience must 
be organized like all other experience. 
As the world grows older and man wiser, 
organization develops and broadens. Na- 
tional societies and alliances become inter- 
national and a parliament of man seems 
a reasonable goal toward which to press. 
Human life in its individual aspect finds its 
fullest freedom in organization and not 
agart from it. The idea of the Catholic 



104 The Sixth Sense 

Church is as old as Christianity. One 
Body, one spirit, one Lord, one Faith, 
one Baptism, said St. Paul before Chris- 
tianity was fifty years old — and the use 
of the Mystic Sense independently of or- 
ganized Christian experience cannot hope 
to reach valuable results. Reformers of 
religion are eccentrics and detract from 
their service so far as they ignore the re- 
ligious experience of the ages by assuming 
exclusive positions or lifting a doctrine 
out of its setting. Our Lord never broke 
with the faith of His fathers. His last 
act was to partake of the Passover accord- 
ing to the law. It was the Jews who 
broke with Him. He came not to destroy 
but to fulfill. The only setting for any 
one part of the truth is all the rest of the 
truth. The only relationship big enough 
for any one man is all the rest of man- 
kind. When at last the disturbed and 
broken Christian Church comes to rest in 
the large scheme of unity planned by its 
Founder, then the mystical life of man 
will gain a power and splendor which now 
is but a vision and a hope. 

This concludes my endeavor to credit 
the Mystic Sense with that dignity and 



The Sixth Sense 105 

position of importance which belongs to 
it by right. The attempt is crude and the 
brilliant vision which I had at the begin- 
ning of my task has become dimmer under 
the process of putting it into words. 
Whatever has been written stands as a 
contribution of thought and experience 
which cannot be of much value until it has 
been purified from the dross of individual- 
ism through the findings of religion and 
science, and lost in the great volume of 
truth to which I submit it with reverence 
and loyalty. 



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